MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Mexican President Felipe Calderon could struggle to win congressional approval of his nominee for attorney general, further hindering his army-led war against powerful drug cartels.
Calderon has named Arturo Chavez as his pick for attorney general in an attempt to revamp the drug fight but the nominee has come under fire for his record as top prosecutor in the northern state of Chihuahua, where he failed to stop the murders of hundreds of young women in the 1990s.
The president removed Eduardo Medina Mora as attorney general last week as the death toll from turf wars between rival drug gangs like the Sinaloa and Gulf cartels has risen to 13,000 people since Calderon took office in December 2006.
The government’s inability to defeat the cartels is Calderon’s biggest challenge and is worrying foreign investors and the United States.
Chavez’s nomination has sparked protests from opposition parties, human rights activists and a group of European lawmakers who accuse him of shoddy police work and negligent investigations during a decade of unsolved murders in Chihuahua, particularly in the main city Ciudad Juarez.
“It is like sending a wolf to protect the lambs,” Spanish lawmaker Raul Romeva said of Chavez’ appointment.
More than 400 young women were strangled, battered and stabbed in Ciudad Juarez on the US border between 1993 and 2003, many on their way to and from work in the city’s factories. Chavez was Chihuahua state attorney general between 1996 and 1998.
Only a few cases have been prosecuted and most of the murders remain a mystery, with speculation for the motives ranging from the presence of a serial killer to drug gang murders or domestic violence.
Victims’ relatives and rights leaders have long charged that inept and corrupt local officials botched the investigations, even torturing innocent suspects to confess.
Calderon’s predecessor, former President Vicente Fox, said in 2004 the failure to solve the womens’ murders was “offensive.”
Chavez is due to testify and be questioned by a Senate committee next week before Congress votes on whether to make him attorney general. Calderon’s conservative National Action Party, or PAN, has only the second largest bloc in Congress and depends on the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, to get bills and appointments approved.
PRI senators have stalled Calderon’s attempts for a quick ratification and several have called on the president to reconsider his nomination.
Former PRI party leader Roberto Madrazo said Calderon had found “a prosecutor from hell on earth.”
A small group of victims’ families held a large banner denouncing Chavez and placed black ribbons outside the state prosecutor’s office in Ciudad Juarez on Monday.
Chavez “didn’t investigate and even covered up numerous cases of femicides,” said one victims’ group, Bring Our Daughters Home, in a letter to the Senate.
Chavez, who was little-known outside Chihuahua before his nomination, was not available for comment.
